Here, according to the editors, comes 'Act IV.' For this
there is no authority, and the point of division seems to me very
objectionable. The scene remains the same, as noted from Capell in _Cam.
Sh._, and the entrance of the king follows immediately on the exit of
Hamlet. He finds his wife greatly perturbed; she has not had time to
compose herself.

From the beginning of Act II., on to where I would place the end of Act
III., there is continuity.]

[Footnote 8: I would have this speech uttered with pauses and growing
urgency, mingled at length with displeasure.]

[Footnote 9: She is faithful to her son, declaring him mad, and
attributing the death of 'the unseen' Polonius to his madness.]

[Footnote 10: This passage, like the rest, I hold to be omitted by
Shakspere himself. It represents Hamlet as divining the plot with whose
execution his false friends were entrusted. The Poet had at first
intended Hamlet to go on board the vessel with a design formed upon this
for the out-witting of his companions, and to work out that design.
Afterwards, however, he alters his plan, and represents his escape as
more plainly providential: probably he did not see how to manage it by
any scheme of Hamlet so well as by the attack of a pirate; possibly he
wished to write the passage (246) in which Hamlet, so consistently with
his character, attributes his return to the divine shaping of the end
rough-hewn by himself. He had designs--'dear plots'--but they were other
than fell out--a rough-hewing that was shaped to a different end. The
discomfiture of his enemies was not such as he had designed: it was
brought about by no previous plot, but through a discovery. At the same
time his deliverance was not effected by the fingering of the packet,
but by the attack of the pirate: even the re-writing of the commission
did nothing towards his deliverance, resulted only in the punishment of
his traitorous companions. In revising the Quarto, the Poet sees that
the passage before us, in which is expressed the strongest suspicion of
his companions, with a determination to outwit and punish them, is
inconsistent with the representation Hamlet gives afterwards of a
restlessness and suspicion newly come upon him, which he attributes to
the Divinity.

Neither was it likely he would say so much to his mother while so little
sure of her as to warn her, on the ground of danger to herself, against
revealing his sanity to the king. As to this, however,